Katherine Clark: “Next week is the fifth-year anniversary of the horrific shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown…”

“Next week is the fifth-year anniversary of the horrific shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. For a brief moment, it looked like we would actually honor those victims by voting on a bill that would improve background checks to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals, but we should never have gotten our hopes up. There is one winner in the House, and it is the gun lobby. The majority has combined the background check bill with a bill that helps move forward the gun lobby's ultimate agenda: gutting States' gun laws. This bill forces every State to accept the concealed carry laws of every other State, including the 12 States that don't even require a permit to carry a concealed weapon in public, even into a school. Let's take one example of the dangerousness of this bill. A woman in an abusive relationship is five times more likely to be killed by her abuser if there is a gun involved. Let that sink in: bringing a gun into an abusive situation means the chances of a woman dying increases by 500 percent. So it makes all the sense in the world that, if this Congress were interested in public safety, saving lives, curbing gun deaths, that we would be talking about keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people. But that is not what is happening here. We are talking about a bill that invites domestic abusers to buy a gun in a State with lax laws and legally carry that gun into any other State.…”